Being and Time – Martin Heidegger

Existentialism

Martin Heidegger was born on 26th September 1889 and died on 26 May 1976 and is a German philosopher. First a disciple of Edmund Husserl and phenomenology, he is quickly moving towards the question of being or ontology. Author of Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), Heidegger it is considered one of the most influential philosophers of the XXe century: his approach mainly influenced Existentialist philosophy, phenomenology and later, postmodern philosophy, German hermeneutics, and other Humanities such as Theology and Psychoanalysis.

Being and time (Sein und Zeit, 1927) is claimed to be Heidegger’s most important work, even though it was never completed beyond its first part it still marks a turning-point of continental philosophy. It is under its influence that grew the branch of Existentialism and Deconstruction.

Heidegger’s project queries the sense of Being from a deconstruction of Dasein (Being-there). For Heidegger, the question of Being fell into oblivion and triviality and therefore suggests that this question should be restated in the light of an “analytic of the Dasein”, i.e. a structural study of human existence.

Dasein may be conceived as a human existence thought as a presence in the world. “Being-in-the-world” is a being which does not merely appear within being. Also, understanding of being itself is a possibility of being of Dasein. Man, Heidegger argues, is this being ontologically privileged in that it always has a certain agreement, not knowledge, of some implicit understanding and theme of what it means “To be” for the things that surround it. As opposed to the ontical, for instance, what imparts to the knowledge constituting that being (ex science) never query the assumptions of its relations to objects. The question of being, on the other hand, is ontological.

Existentialism is finely intertwined with the phenomenological method of ‘returning the things themselves’ which it uses to uncover what it means to be human. It is generally accepted that ‘most esistentialists are phenomenologists, though there are many phenomenologists who are not existentialists’ (Macquarrie – 1972).